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Comment by uberman | Hacker News Reader

While I appreciate the comparisons, a fairer comparison would be to compare expensive Canadian cities to expensive American cities.

A nice condo in SF or NYC is also likely to get you that mansion in Georgia.

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There is no apples to apples comparison in the first place.

Most of Canada is sparsely inhabited or uninhabitable. Unlike the US, there are far fewer places to live besides the major metro areas.

SF and NYC are not good comparisons either. Yes, they are expensive and 90%+ of the country could never afford to live there—that part is the same—but Americans have so many more options. There are small- and medium-sized cities all over the US.

Exactly. Canada does not* have many cities and much of the nation has little to no infrastructure.

Even small towns are well >$600k for rundown detached houses here.

There's multiple considerations. For example. If you need access to quality healthcare for certain conditions, you'll need be limited in cities you can reside in/near.

What is the difficulty in developing more housing in less populated regions of Canada? Cost of materials, permitting and regulations, uninhabitable climate?

All of the above, plus labour costs for building, lack of infrastructure, and most importantly, lack of an economy.

Even if someone can survive the isolation living in the north requires (and the $7 heads of lettuce) there often isn't many options for earning an income.

Nobody wants to live there. Canada has plenty of cheaper places like Calgary and Edmonton and Regina, but few move.

All of the above plus add on the fact that much of what seems like "empty land" on map is not actually viable in any way for housing development.

British Columbia is absolutely massive but it's all mountain. The places to build are already built upon.

To be fair, there are huge flat expanses in the Vancouver metro area that have nothing but single-storey, single-family homes on them. It's not really the most efficient use of the space.

It's what people prefer to live in given options most of the time though. For all the benefits of living in a dense urban core with walkable everything a lot of people like the quieter suburbs. It's also that the story of "making it" usually involves having your own detached family single family house which pushes people to that as well.

I always want to push back against the narrative that people's natural state is to want a single family home. Out of control zoning makes single family detached homes the only possibility apart from some specially designated urban cores, so it can easily seem like people only want detached homes. It's easy to look at our current housing stock and think it's what people want, but it's the work of a small group of people enforcing their choices across decades of zoning. There are plenty of people who want a single family home and that's fine. What I'm not fine with is their choice being encoded into city law as the only choice.

There is also a knee-jerk reaction across north america to any density beyond single family homes automatically being glass and steel high rises that block the sun. What we really need is missing middle properties, like tri- and quad-plexes. Low and mid rise apartment buildings with plenty of 2, 3 and 4 bedroom units. A lot more density than we have in suburbs now, but not crowded or packed.

Montreal is one of the few cities in north america that actually has that missing middle housing. It's also the only metro region in Canada that has both mostly contained sprawl and been relatively unaffected by the housing crisis. This is not a coincidence since people have all sorts of choices about what type of housing to live in that fits their budget and lifestyle instead of ones forced by extremely limited zoning options.

> It's what people prefer to live in given options most of the time though.

I am sure many others prefer lower rent or not being homeless

I'm not sure it's possible to simply out build the ridiculous amounts of cash sloshing around in the real estate market from speculators and foreign investors using it as a way to move money out of their countries. Even in places with loose zoning rules that allow for almost any building to go up anywhere (eg parts of Texas) house prices are still spiking far faster than people's ability to afford them.

Yeah this is def the stuff that badly, badly needs to be redeveloped.

Remote towns have been stagnate or depopulating for decades. The problems for residents may be lack of services, high taxes, high energy costs, lack of opportunity, access to shipping, etc.

From the government's perspective. There are many factors for not building and improving remote towns. Some are: a) climate change (vehicles, heating, trucking and more) b) lack of infrastructure (gas, roads, railroads, healthcare) c) lack of budget (most of Federal revenues go to redistribution payments)

The biggest issue I've noticed in Canada is a lack of will. Ibn Khaldun noticed later in a nation, citizens view the function of government as a means to provide leisure. Western Civilization is obviously going through a time of major upheaval. The 1950s - 1990s were an aberration, I don't think we're going to see those standards of living in the future. We can't expect large scale shipping routes to remote locations, so people can live in detached housing. Future housing will likely be large scale, high density, low sqft apartments designed for maximum efficiency of energy and infrastructure.

My thoughts are the nation technically doesn't need many people living in rural areas. The collective pursuits will win over the individual in the future.

Before mass mechanization, we needed far more people to cut trees, mine nickel, or grow wheat. Now, we need far fewer people to do those things. But services like schools, banks, and hospitals have need certain levels of population to fund themselves and scale. These forces are the effects of capital, technology, and demographics, not will.

It's many factors. However, the inability to create new cities and infrastructure can be overcome with will.

Now, whether we need new cities is a separate question.

In Canada where taxation and housing is expensive, the complaint has been that fertile landed is being used for urban sprawl.

One potential solution, that's rarely discussed, is to build cities in the North adjacent to large bodies of water. With access to shipping routes, lower taxation and superior infrastructure to make up for the adverse affects of weather.

You may argue the economic incentives and capital aren't there. I'd argue there's a massive misallocation of capital and the economy is fundamentally broken, but that'd be a lengthy discussion.

How to do you have lower taxation when your costs (heating, food, labour, transportation, construction materials) are all higher? The north doesn't even have permanent roads, and building those would cost billions of dollars and zillions every year as the frost destroys them. Ask the Soviet Union if profitably settling the north is a mere matter of will.

The easy way is to provide dirty water, shabby schools, and expensive food, but we do that already and people aren't exactly flocking north.

> Even small towns are well >$600k for rundown detached houses here.

Where is this? As an Albertan my experience isn't even that in the city.

There are lots of "small towns" in Canada where you can purchase a house for less than 200k CAD. Just not in Southern Ontario. Just like there are lots of places you can purchase a house in small town America just not on Long Island or in the 5 boroughs.

Most Americans still live in large metro areas, either in the cities themselves or the suburbs.

There’s this myth that america has all this land and space and that causes this or that, which is partially true, but the reason why Toronto is expensive has nothing to do with the fact that it’s very challenging to live in the northern reaches of the country. Canada has 1/10th the population of the US and fewer people than the single state of California. There’s plenty of space within the few major cities within the country.

For another reference, there are more people living in the New York and LA metro areas than in all of Canada.

That is not true, cities in Alberta have observed very stable housing prices since 2014, and there is plenty infrastructure and space to build.

>SF and NYC are not good comparisons either. Yes, they are expensive and 90%+ of the country could never afford to live there—that part is the same—but Americans have so many more options. There are small- and medium-sized cities all over the US.

It's entirely possible in the US to rise to the top of most industries without moving to NYC, Chicago, or LA. It's not possible to do so in Canada without moving to Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver (plus Calgary/Edmonton for energy).

This is a story familiar to every Canadian, and to many Australians and Britons:

Mid-career executive accepts job offer in the US in some place like Dallas, Phoenix, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, or Tampa. Is excited about the opportunity and the raise in salary, and curious about living in a different country, but a little nervous about moving to a "right wing Republican" state "without healthcare".

A few months in, the reports back to friends and family change. More and more mention of the "amazing" house they found in the suburbs with an outdoor pool (!) that is so much less expensive than in Toronto or Vancouver, the "fantastic" school the kids attend with sports teams and cheerleading and other afterschool activities, and—especially—how unbelievably cheap everything is at the supermarket, mall, and gas station.

That family is never moving back to Canada. This happens over and over again.

(Also, NYC/Chicago/LA are cheaper than Toronto/Vancouver, anyway. A Canadian expatriate in the US reported recently that her home in Fairfield County, Connecticut (very, very upscale NYC suburb) is cheaper than GTA.)

I don't think there are any US Cities where the price of a house or condo doubled to tripled during the pandemic. There is no where in NA where the price of a house is rising at approx 2k a week, The average price of a house in Toronto is predicted to rise by 100k this year. It isn't just Toronto anymore, actually Toronto is super affordable. The prices across the province especially in areas outside of Toronto that have been historically low have sky rocketed. King Township average price is like 2.6 million.

https://www.zolo.ca/toronto-real-estate/trends

Thank the Federal Gov/BoC for destroying the dream of ownership for millions.

Housing prices did double in most mid tier cities during the pandemic. Just not the big ones like NYC, SF, Seattle which were already sky high.

While I don't live in a big city, a neighbor of mine purchased their ranch for 700k pre-pandemic and have just offered it for sale three years later for 1.5 million so price doubling is not exclusive to Canada nor to "big cities".

To be fair, you showcase King, but King is a very affluent community and thanks to the 400 running through the middle of King Township, it is a bedroom community even for downtown Toronto. The homes for sale in King tend to be in the 3500 to 5000 sqft range and while they are super expensive, a 5000 sqft house, an hours drive from Manhattan, with a yard would cost as much or more in USD than a house in King for CAD.

You say this is a government / bank problem. Should the Feds (CA and/or USA) have kept interest rates high during COVID to keep house prices low?

Housing prices doubled for many places on the US.

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